We buy trucks in Sprague

One operation is attached to Sprague in the node list: a crushed-stone quarry running 5 employees, 4.20 miles from the centroid.

Five hands on a rural gate is a working quarry rather than an occasional one, and what leaves it goes in open-topped tandems and tri-axles on short legs. This is wheat country as well, so the same roads carry hopper bottoms in season, and the two trades share whatever the roads allow.

Which, out here, is not measured across much: the circle around this gate is one of the thinner ones in the lane.

MSHA Mine Data Retrieval System; the node list at docs/nodes/node-list.json. The distance is straight-line to the place centroid, not a drive.

That thinness is the first fact about it. Within ten miles of the gate the federal bridge inventory records just 23 structures — a sparse network rather than a dense one — and 2 of them are coded below legal loads, both county-maintained.

A sparse circle cuts both ways. Fewer crossings means fewer chances to meet a posted one; it also means fewer ways around the one you do meet.

The tightest rates 17.8 metric tonnes, about 19.6 US tons, and carries Ringwood Road 5.04 miles from the gate — which is also the nearest restriction of any kind. Over the 11.0-tonne tare of an empty tandem dump that admits roughly 6.8 tonnes of stone.

Read it as an upper bound. It is a minimum inside a ten-mile circle, and at 64.1% of nodes measured this way something tighter lies between ten miles and twenty.

FHWA National Bridge Inventory 2025, Washington file, items 41, 64 and 70; docs/nodes/FINDING-radius-sensitivity.md for the radius figure.

Those two crossings are the local ceiling. The statute above them gives no single figure either.

Washington’s maximum gross is 105,500 lb. The statute bars more than 20,000 lb on any single axle, and lets two consecutive sets of tandem axles carry 34,000 lb each where the first and last axle sit 36 feet or more apart, with the groups in between governed by the bridge formula.

Then it opens up again. The department of transportation by rule for state highways, and a local authority for a road under its own jurisdiction, may extend that table to 115,000 lb. So the operative figure is an administrative rule or a local ordinance rather than anything printed in the code, and no page can honestly hand you one number. Whether the 105,500 survives on the interstate is not established by the files behind this page, and we are not going to guess at it.

Seasonal limits work the same way, and Washington writes down something most states leave implied. A local authority may restrict a road that rain, snow or thaw would seriously damage — and the ordinance is not effective unless and until the signs are up and being maintained. The sign is the rule. Which roads are posted in a given week is not in any file we hold.

RCW 46.44.041 on axle loads and the extension to 115,000 lb, and RCW 46.44.080 on local seasonal restrictions. Information, not legal advice.

Past the roads and the loads, the paperwork is that one sentence.

Everything after it is a fix rather than a category. A lost title has a counter replacement; where none exists there is a bonded route. Neither of those stops a sale.

One Washington duty has a clock on it where most states’ have none, and it is the one to know about if a truck has been written off. Where a vehicle is destroyed or declared a total loss, the owner — or the insurer, once it has settled — has fifteen days to report it to the department and surrender the title. The statute names the fifteen days itself, which is unusual.

RCW 46.12.600. Information, not legal advice.

None of that narrows what we will look at. Dump trucks and aggregate haulers, grain hauls and bulk rigs, day cabs and road tractors, flatbeds, rollbacks, service bodies, box trucks and straight trucks, and the work trucks and pickups that go with a crew.

Box trucks and straight trucks are not a Lincoln County thing in particular — they are everywhere. They are on the list because we buy them here too.

Whatever you drive, the offer doesn’t change. We buy all of them. The gate 4.20 miles out and the farm roads around it are where most of them turn up.

• Does it have to run?No. It does have to be complete — if the engine, transmission, doors, rear ends, drive shafts, wheels or anything under the hood have been removed, we can’t buy it. Rust is not a disqualifier.
• The engine is out of it. Is that different?Yes, and that is the line. A tired engine is fine; an engine that has been pulled out and sold means we can’t buy the truck.
• What about the title?We need one unless the truck is old enough that it never had one. Lost titles have a counter replacement; where none exists there’s a bonded route. If it was ever declared a total loss, the fifteen-day reporting duty is the department’s, not a bar on selling it.
• It hauls rock in summer and grain in autumn. Does mixed work matter?Not to the offer, and it is the normal pattern out here. Tell us the hours as well as the miles and roughly what it carried.
• Do you come out to Lincoln County?Yes, all of it and the country around it — the gate 4.20 miles out included, and the Ringwood Road crossing beyond it. We come to you and drive it away, we come to you and tow it, we buy it remotely and arrange the tow, or you drive it to us.

Those questions come up because the reasons for selling are mostly personal. Retiring, and nobody in the family wanting the truck. A medical that went the wrong way. A hauling contract that ended with a season. A truck sitting behind a shed since somebody stopped driving it, costing insurance every month it does not turn a wheel.

Around Lincoln County it is the same trucks for the same reasons, most of them working out of a gate 4.20 miles from town or a farm a long way past it.

Most of those aren’t happy reasons, and we don’t treat them like they are. Somebody wants a straight answer and the truck gone by the end of the week. That’s what we’re here for.